


Dead Man Walking

by Sarah_Frog



Category: DC Cinematic Universe, Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, I am slow, I've been working on this for about 3 weeks, Steve wakes up in the 21st Century
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-25
Updated: 2017-07-09
Packaged: 2018-11-18 23:18:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11300895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sarah_Frog/pseuds/Sarah_Frog
Summary: Acrid smoke. Fire. Get up. Get up. These are the first thought running through his head as he awakes. He is lying in a pile of rubbles.Steve wakes up in Gotham. He doesn't know why or how. The world has changed. He needs to learn about the world of men, not unlike Diana had done a century ago. Except he's on his own.





	1. Chapter 1

# 1.

Acrid smoke. Fire. Get up. Get up. These are the first thought running through his head as he awakes. He is lying in a pile of rubbles. Coughing, he kneels and tries to get a sense of his surrounding, the wind is blowing and clearing some of the smoke. He can see tall buildings far away, shrouded in smog.              

He could not be on a battlefield, so the only place that remains a possibility was Hell. Steve has always known he’d end up in Hell. It was payback for the time he thought he ended up in paradise on Themyscira.

He can walk, so he starts climbing down the rubbles. He shreds his jacket, it’s too hot, pieces of his German uniform are singed, most parts covered in dust. He can still hear the bang of the canon just before things went black and he woke up here.

He stumbles on a dead man, his chest under an enormous rusty iron bar. How could someone die further in Hell, he isn’t sure. He looks at him for several minutes, taking in his tattered clothes, and the smell that is not just death around him. Homeless. There is a bag next to him and Steve grabs it. Pilfering through a dead man’s affairs is not the worst thing he had done in the war, he needs information and whatever possession this man had more than him.

He finds a ratty jumper, a bottle of beer, some food wrapped in an unfamiliar package, and at the bottom of the bag, a passport.

_Nicholas Devereaux, born August 26 th 1985\. _

Steve runs a dirty hand through his hair. Where was he actually? When is he? The things in this man’s bag were familiar yet so different.

He is a spy, he had fought in the war to end all wars. He’d muddle his way through this. The dead man had blond hair, his height about the same as he, he knows what needs to be done. He hopes he has not suffered before dying and opens the man’s eyelids briefly. Blue eyes. He could work with that.

Steve leaves the place as fire is getting closer. He can hear sirens from afar.

He crosses the barriers of the port easily and enters the city. He can see burnt shapes. Cars? They were but they were different. Unfamiliar. He somehow ends up on shopping street everything is too loud, even the colours. Gaudy, tacky, yet he can see how deprived the place is.

He crosses to a different street. Boarded up shops and broken signs, several decrepit buildings, streets covered in rubble this place had clearly been at war recently. There was scarcely any one here. He’d seen a few other homeless people. Some of them in the throes of alcohol, others in what he’d rather not know. He takes a turn in another street, a bunch of younger people were handing out leaflets, he approaches them.

“Hello sir. We are handing out information about a shelter for people in need,” says a young man, a kind expression on his face.

“Yeah?”  He croaks.

“ It’s getting late but they might still have places. It’s 3 blocks away,” the young man shrugs.

No harm in trying.

*

There is a small queue when he arrives to the building, there are several people wearing clothes in different states of disrepair. He hears several languages, Spanish mainly, sees people of different colours talking to each other, laughing together. He wonders how many years in the future he is.

Because there’s no doubt about it.

Steve wants to retreat some place quiet as reality hits him, his breath quickens. He’s in the future, he’s not dead, he’s in America, on Earth. He can’t breathe, that queue is suffocating him.

“You alright, buddy? Sit down, I ain’t going to step on you,” says a gruff voice.

Steve feels a hand on his shoulder, he shrugs it off and turn around, he’s faced with a tall man, short brown hair, and brown eyes, dark skinned.

“How long have you been back?” The man asks.

“Back?” Asks Steve back at him. Are dead people from the past going back regularly here?

“Afghanistan, or wherever you’ve been. Didn’t mean to pry. Just know, you’re not alone, yeah?”

“Thanks.” Mumbles Steve.

There’s another war in Afghanistan. Blame the British? Yes. Probably. He regains his breath. The queue goes forward. He arrives at a desk. An older woman looks at him, she purses her lips.

“ID?”

“I...I have documentation, yes.”

He ruffles through the bag- the dead man’s bag- and hands her “his” passport. There’s a commotion at the desk next to him. A woman sounds like she is swearing in a Slavic language.

“I don’t have passport. Please let me sleep, one night. Please”

“Sorry, ma’am. We can’t let you in. Or we’ll have to report you to the police.”

“Please.” she begs.

“Can’t you do something?” Asks Steve.

“I’m sorry, Mr Devereaux, we can’t take in people with no ID, it’s our policy

A better woman would have intervened at this injustice. Steve should have intervened; all he was left with was excuses to justify why he didn’t. He was a spy, he needed to survive, he needed to keep a low profile. He nodded at the woman at the desk.

“We have a one week stay policy. No drugs on the premises, no arms of any kind, no alcohol, no fighting, or you will be thrown out. Understood?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Jim will give you a shower and bedding pack, and a locker key. Dinner is in two hours.” 

“Thank you.”

Steve arrives in a rather steamy room, it smells strongly of some sort of perfume. The wonders of the future. Hot running water at will. Finding an empty spot, he draws the curtain behind himself and removes his clothes. He can deal with the strange texture of this liquid soap. He can deal with everything that is different and only slightly similar. He steps under the shower, it’s warm and he hasn’t had a proper clean since...London. He scrubs himself, trying not to think about what he left behind. He died, but he hasn’t. His friends have lived but are long dead by now. He’s alone. So terribly alone. Steve’s chest ache, he holds back a sob and cries silently until he’s urged to move out of there.

After that he spends the rest of the evening in a daze, his body knows what to do – get changed, eat, appear normal, don’t raise suspicion, go to bed. He does not find sleep that night, his meal ends up in the toilets, he’s not on his own, he hears the retching of drug addicts in other cubicles.

Later, he’s looking at his pale reflection in the mirror when he hears a commotion. He does not get involved. He’s weary of everything, he’s been working on survival mode for hours and he’s refusing to face the backlash of what his sacrifice, of what he felt for Diana, of everything else. It’s too much for a man to take in in a handful of hours. Instead he slips to the floor, his chest is too tight and he can’t breathe.

He wakes up hours later, roused by some sort of guard, the man has a baton and Steve feels like a criminal.

“Get up, lazy, breakfast is served” The man sneers.

Steve bites his tongue, and throws a scathing look at him. He splashes water over his face.

Once he’s downstairs, he’s faced with a lot of people talking, it’s like a slap in the face, people haven’t stopped existing, they don’t notice anything particular about him. He gets his food and spots a seat somewhere quiet.

“May I?” He asks an elderly man, pointing at the newspaper he was reading. 

“Of course my boy.”

 **_The Gotham Gazette_ ** _.  November 9, 2017._

Stephen Trevor has been thirty years old for about a century.

Steve inhales. He’ll work this out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been making heart eyes at this film since it came out!
> 
> You will not have me believe that Steve Trevor is any less than 30y/o, no way!
> 
> I'm not a native speaker, so if anyone wants to beta this I'd be more than happy! At the moment about 3 chapters have been written.
> 
> Let me know if formatting is wonky, I have to post this from my phone, my landlords have an adult filter for their grandchildren...


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Steve gets a job.

There are history books in the main foyer of the shelter. He thought he had died for peace, that Dr Maru’s experiments on people were the worst atrocities he’d seen. He was wrong. They’d all been very wrong.

He doesn’t dare use the strange black box with the screen yet, the computer, he needs to look at how other people use it, he’ll get around it at some point. He’s lucky old Harry is there, he listens to his rants about the good old days and learns. He knows that it’s a wealth of information at his fingertips. He can access anything at anytime with this.

According to Harry, everyone his age and under knows what to do with a computer, they even have smartphone, which they can fit in their pockets and which dictates their lives.

Diana took his pseudo modern world with stride because she had a purpose. He does not. He does not know how he got back, or why, and was there even a reason? He’ll have to make do with what he has.

Steve knows this place is just a respite and that there are people who need this place more than he does. He’s learned that there is help for soldiers like Charlie, but that there’s not enough money. Everything has to do with money, even soldiers’ back from the horrors of war are not enough for the government to be generous. His country is still geared towards war, as it has been for a century, not for peace. He died in vain. Beings from other planets wreck this world, but no more than mankind, there is no end. Maybe Ares has won.

The papers available in the foyer mention the incident, then there’s Superman’s funeral, so he reads as much as he can, there are a lot of opinion pieces, then there are discussions on TV, about whether this alien should have been allowed on Earth. He inadvertently brought people from his world here, and they almost destroyed it. 

All Steve gathers from this is that this…man, person, sacrificed himself for Earth, he may have been a threat, as is anyone so overpowered, but there were no indication he wanted to do anything else but help people. He’s been there for two days, and the future looks bleak, it is gray and decaying. It had been such a slap in the face, he never gave a thought about the future when he was at war, especially what it would look like in a hundred years, but he was expecting something a bit more peaceful; wars had not changed humans for the better.

The small screen of the foyer is on one morning, he usually goes past it and into the library, that’s what he had done for the past four days. He reads, and reads, and learns about the customs of his people, but he hears the people murmuring today.

“There’s another one!”says an excited voice.

“That’s the monster that killed him, right?”

“Is that a glowing lasso?”

Steve stops at that and turns heels to look at the screen. There she is. The image is blurry and the shape moves too fast but he knows it’s her. Diana was there the night before he reappeared four days ago.

He doesn’t believe in miracles, or in fate, but he’s been given a second chance at something. He needs to find her.

* * *

 

He asks about getting a job, anything, he says he’ll adapt. He brushes his hair out of his eyes gives his best smile to the manager. The man stammers and blushes. He says he’ll do what he can, he might have something. Steve is asked to come back in a couple of hours.

The man at the desk hands him a paper with an address.

“It’s your lucky week. There’s a charity working with….with homeless people. They will help you find work, get a bank account, find your social security, help you find a home. You’re a good candidate for it. Tell them Chris sent you.”

“Thank you.”

Steve changes clothes. He’s got cleaner, less used and more modern ones. Old Harry gives him tips, tells him he’s got all his chances; that he looks like an Aryan wet dream anyway. Steve wishes he didn’t know what it meant.

He walks to his destination, it takes half an hour, it’s not like he has money to take the bus. Everything is more expensive. He gawked at the price of food as he went around a supermarket. Half of the stuff he’d never heard of. The rest twice the size of what he’d been used to.

The office is empty, bar from two bored looking people. He knocks and enters.

“Welcome to the Life Starts Now project! How may we help you today?” says one woman in a cheerful voice.

“I’ve been told to come here for a job, ma’am. Chris sends me.”

“Of course he does,” she says looking at him, “do you have any form of ID on you?” Steve hands her his passport. “Perfect, first, let me tell you what we do here, then we’ll see what we can do for you.”

Steve nods and readies himself for the sales pitch.

“…you will have an account sorted, this might be difficult but we work with the Wayne Foundation, taking a job with us makes it easier.”

“What’s the catch?”

“I’m sorry?” asks the lady at the desk, puzzled.

“You can’t tell me I get to have all that, without paying for anything.” Steve narrows her eyes at her. 

She does the same at him.

“Your contract will run for a year within Wayne Enterprises, you will have access to housing at a moderate cost, if you breach any of our policies, which are fairly straightforward, you will not have access to any further help from us and will be asked to move out of your place. We’re here to help people in your situation, we are lucky we get funding for this. You are lucky you don’t seem to have an addiction which prevents you from being coherent. Homeless addicts are very easy to spot, you don’t seem to be one of them. That’s the catch, Mr Devereaux.”

Her arms crossed around her chest, the woman looked at him defiantly.

“Alright, my apologies. One year contract, I can deal with that. I...I haven’t been to school for long.”

Steve cleared his throat. Everything was recorded, everyone could find information. He couldn’t lie his way out of this, but he couldn’t be honest either, he’d have to be vague enough. I’m a spy for the Allies was not going to work.

“I’m Macy Smith, by the way. At the moment, we have a few jobs going on, but for someone with little qualifications, some might not be available.”

It doesn’t take him long to pick a job, some of them would blow his...cover. He’d attract too much attention if he tried to be a chauffeur, he’d had a look at the cars; he does not have the skills for many others, so he picks the one that will be the most inconspicuous.

Night cleaner for Wayne Enterprises, Metropolis Branch. 

He smiles at Macy.

Salary sorted for the next year then, besides he knows he needed to get out of Gotham. The city had been awful back then, and now it gives him even more the creeps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am still looking for a beta!  
> Thanks for everyone who commented and the kudos!  
> I'm glad some of you saw and appreciated the princess diaries references!
> 
> Do let me know if there's any formatting errors, I have to do all that on my phone!


End file.
